


Interlude I

by Deannie



Series: The Silence In Between [2]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-18 07:40:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 14,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21940588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: What happened between seasons one and two.
Relationships: Kanan Jarrus/Hera Syndulla
Series: The Silence In Between [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1564306
Comments: 40
Kudos: 77





	1. The present should not burn, and yet...

_“You will tell me where to find your rebel friends.”_

The words intruded, sliding into Kanan’s meditation like a dagger into flesh, and just as painful.

Breathe in. Out… Breathe in.

_The images were more painful still, and Kanan had been too open to them to protect himself. Hera fell under fire from Kallus’s troops, and Zeb and Sabine. Ezra…_

No. No, that was the past. And they were only images, only torture. Not real then and not real ever. Breathe in. Out… Brea—

_Ezra, held tight in a magnetic field, trapped on the molten planet below, bombarded again and again by lightning that ran along every nerve. Screaming. Broken—_

_The Inquisitor’s eyes glowed with triumph._

_—Turning._

Kanan snapped his eyes open, letting the familiar confines of his cabin—the familiar feel of Ezra and Zeb safe in the cabin next door, Hera and Sabine down the hall—calm him. As much as he could be calmed. 

One of the real problems of growing up in the Jedi temple on Coruscant was that lying to yourself turned out to be really hard. It had taken drunken, stupid _years_ for him to learn how to ignore what he knew he was feeling. Not feeling with the Force, just… feeling.

_“Know your mind, must you, younglings. Only then may you look beyond the thoughts to what lies within.”_

Yoda never made much sense to Caleb’s thoughts, but his mind must have got it, because Kanan knew what his problem was. He just didn’t want to face it. And of course, after years of Hera’s persistence and months of Ezra’s enthusiasm, he was having a hard time remembering how to ignore again.

His “almost perfect” hadn’t lasted long.

He had been out of the bacta for more than a week now, home for days. And yet, really, he was still orbiting Mustafar, wasn’t he? Caught in a loop he couldn’t get out of because, for every thing that _had_ happened, he could come up with five or ten things that _could_ happen now because of them. He was more thankful than he could say that his family had come for him, but the repercussions were enormous and he simply wasn’t the person strong enough to face and overcome them.

With a sigh, he stood. He’d get no sleep tonight, but that wasn’t any different than any other night, so why fight it? Instead, he opened his door and stepped out into the hall. The cockpit was open, the outline of Hera seen dimly in her chair. Working. Endlessly.

The rebellion never slept either, he thought bitterly. Another _thing_ that could happen. If he lost Hera to the rebellion...

Without bothering to try to talk to her because he didn’t know what to say anymore, anyway, Kanan instead walked back to the galley. He set his mokla to brew and waited and tried desperately to think of nothing. But of course, nothing never came.

It all seemed cosmically unfair. Against everything the Force had been telling him, everything he thought he’d seen in his vision, he’d survived the ordeal—they’d even triumphed…

_Does your loyal and precious crew know you ran as your master fell?_

“Hey,” Ezra muttered quietly, managing to surprise Kanan with his presence. It spoke to his state of mind. He should always feel his apprentice coming. “So… I guess you... couldn’t sleep either, huh?”

Ezra was many things—he was even a good liar, handily enough—but he was not calculating enough to be subtle when he was worried about someone. And Kanan knew, from a million little glances his way in the last week, that Ezra was worried.

Kanan shrugged. “I’m brewing some mokla if you want some.”

“Yuck,” Ezra replied mildly, and that at least was pure truth. He rummaged in the pantry, finding some of Hera’s Ryl tea instead. “I don’t know how you guys drink that stuff.”

Kanan could say the same about the Ryl tea. But he didn’t. He didn’t seem to have a lot of words these days. They were all stuck in the druk in his brain.

“Can I ask you something?” Ezra asked, tentatively. He sounded like he had back at the beginning. Before all the drama. Funny how it was turning out that he would have lived longer being a loth-rat on the streets of Capital City than he was likely to joining the Jedi Order—such as it currently was.

“Sure,” Kanan replied. He didn’t promise to answer.

“What happened?”

Kanan stiffened. 

“When we…” Ezra was feeling his way around the words. Feeling his way around Kanan. “When you came back, things were… different.” He looked up and his blue eyes were sad. And scared. “They’re not now—or, they are, but they’re _different_ different.”

Kanan gave himself a second, walked to the table and sat down. When he looked at Ezra, he saw a child. But at Ezra’s age, he himself had already been and ceased to be a commander in the Republic’s Army. He’d killed by the time he was Ezra’s age. More than once, in fact. Not in an explosion, or a shipcrash, but face-to-face.

“When I was younger than you, I learned to resist the kind of torture the Empire uses,” he began, as tentative as Ezra had been just moments before. “I learned to… disregard what was said. To rise above the drugs and the pain.” He chuckled blackly. “Guess I wasn’t the best student.”

Ezra didn’t speak. He’d either been taking lessons from Hera or just… lost his voice, like Kanan had lately.

“Kallus and Tarkin just wanted all of this—the _Ghost_ , the rebellion.” He took a deep breath. “The Inquisitor wanted something different.”

“Yeah,” Ezra murmured. “I got that.” 

“It’s easier to turn the angry to the Dark Side. The scared. The grief-stricken.” He looked up and saw Ezra’s acknowledgment of his own brush with the Inquisitor’s tactics. “Let’s just say there’s a lot in my past that I didn’t need paraded out in front of me,” he whispered finally.

There was a lot he didn’t need to be reminded of. And a lot he hadn’t needed to know—like the cold, dark, slick feel of Mustafar roiling beneath the star destroyer, waiting to devour him. And then devour Ezra when Kanan proved too weak to prevent them getting their hands on him.

Ezra turned to the stove, took the mokla off before it could burn. He was silent for so long and Kanan had no idea what to do about the silence.

“What about now?” Ezra asked finally.

“What?” What _about_ now? The Inquisitor was dead, but his master still lived. He’d be coming for them. Coming for them and Hera and Zeb and Sabine and the whole damn fleet of people who had risked themselves for him.

“Kanan, I saw you fight him. That wasn’t someone who was fighting because he was angry or scared—because you… thought I was dead and you were grief-stricken. The Dark Side didn’t have anything to do with what you were doing.”

Kanan nodded, eyes closed against that memory and every other one that battered at him. His brief flirtation with fighting clean didn’t make him a Jedi Knight. And it didn’t suddenly make him ready for what might happen in the future.

 _“You have no idea what you’ve unleashed here today,”_ the Inquisitor had said. And wasn’t that the point? When he left, surrendered himself to Tarkin, he’d been saving them all, he thought. Had he doomed them all by letting them bring him home?

“You told me—more than once—” they shared a grin at Ezra’s eye rolling tone, though Kanan didn’t open his own eyes to see it “—that being in the present is the only way to truly be one with the Force.”

“It’s not as easy as that,” Kanan argued. _Not when the present is so thoroughly poisoned._ “The past—”

“Isn’t the present, right?” Ezra suddenly plopped a mug of mokla down before Kanan, whose eyes popped open at the movement. “When I was a kid… after they took Mom and Dad, I would pray, every night to wake up in the morning and have it not happen. And then when I slept, I dreamed of all the ways I could have stopped it from happening.”

Which was a horrible thing for a seven-year-old to have to contemplate, but Kanan didn’t say that.

“But I woke up and they were still gone.” Ezra reached out, touching Kanan’s arm and sending a jolt of sadness and worry and affection through the contact. Whether he understood what he was doing or not didn’t matter. “Whatever the Inquisitor dug up, it happened. Like my Mom and Dad. You can’t change it.”

Kanan was suddenly sixteen again, standing on the spongy earth of Moraga. Newly born from the ashes of Caleb Dume’s destruction. He’d breathed in, feeling every bit of the then-present world around him, and let the past die and the future remain unseen. 

_Caleb Dume is dead,_ he remembered thinking. _What happened to him, I can’t change. What happens to_ me _, I can’t know._

Kanan sipped at the sweetly bitter brew and breathed in. Ezra had let go of his arm, but he was near, drinking that tea of Hera’s that smelled like wet Lasat. Hera and Chopper were arguing in the cockpit—quietly, so as not to wake the rest of the ship. Zeb and Sabine were sleeping and restful and still bright presences in his mind. Even the souls aboard _Phoenix Home_ , attached to them by airlock… Here. Now. Present.

Kanan couldn’t think of a single memory that was exactly this, and so he didn’t. The future never stopped changing, Master Billaba used to tell him, so he couldn’t think of a _single_ future that could start from this moment, only hundreds. Thousands. More than he could map out in a lifetime. There was planning, his master would say, and there was obsession...

He listened to the world around him.

...and there was now. 

His thoughts finally fell away from what lay within. Peace. Purpose. Stillness.

“You’re getting very wise for an apprentice,” he said after a while, reveling in a silence he hadn’t been able to find in far too long.

Ezra grinned. “I learned from the best.”

************

tbc...


	2. The past burns bitter lies

Kanan managed, for the most part, to keep that silence in mind, though the side effect was a marked silence in voice as well. But at least the endless rat-tail-chase of his thoughts only took him at night, now, not all the time. 

Hera and Sabine no longer prompted him to speak, though he didn’t take that as a good thing. He tried though, and as he tried, he began to see a little less worry on their faces. Ezra still felt the difference in him, but Ezra was different, too. Kanan felt the Force rising in him, a Force Ezra couldn’t use without a master. 

Ahsoka’s words to him on the _Nyaga An_ were always in his mind. Not like the druk that his imprisonment had left him, but as a clear reminder that Ezra needed to learn to protect himself when the Inquisitor’s master finally came calling. He needed to learn to resist the darkness that Kanan knew was in him.

A thousand whispered and half-heard discussions when he was a child reminded him, as well, that a Force-wielder who came too late to training was at a higher risk than ones like him, who had grown in the Force with leaders to lead them.

_At least for a while._

So to help Ezra and to help himself, he made sure they trained and meditated and worked. And for long stretches, things seemed normal. As normal as things got with them trailing a fleet of rebel ships in their wake.

Kanan still didn’t like being on _Phoenix Home_. They’d been traveling with the squadron for four weeks now, including his time in the tank, and he mostly tried to keep to the _Ghost_ when he could. The command ship was a Pelta, retrofit with upgraded weapons. A medical frigate turned gunboat.

He’d ridden in Peltas, during the war. Never from anything good or to anything good, though that youthful enthusiasm he now remembered with unease made light of the travels. And always, always, those travels had one or more friends availing themselves of the medical services within. It was hard to silence the past when it was all around you, striding down the halls with military purpose, and he hated the ship itself in a sort of juvenile way. 

So why in the name of all stars was he sitting in its cafeteria, joining Zeb for a drink?

“How’s Jak?” he asked.

_Because your friend needs you here. Now._

Zeb sighed. “They think he’ll be all right. Couple of weeks in the bacta tank.” He took a long draught of his ale; rubbed absently at the new scar that graced his upper arm. “Kriffin’ mines.”

Zeb had volunteered for a mission to an old Sepratist base, looking for supplies and intel and the usual things. The Seps had mined the place before they left.

“If I’d just heard the damn thing,” Zeb growled. “By the time I caught the buzz of it…”

“Zeb, there was nothing you could do,” Kanan told him truthfully, knowing Zeb knew that. Knowing Zeb was doing the same thing he’d done. Zeb was scared and worried and guilty and rethinking every move he’d made since he left the _Ghost_ three days ago. “You got him out and got him home.”

“More than I did for my own,” Zeb muttered, so quietly that Kanan knew he wasn’t supposed to hear it. 

“More than a lot of us did,” Kanan replied anyway. Because he knew from brutal experience that feeling alone in that kind of failure was a dangerous thing. 

Zeb knew that, too. He drained the rest of his drink and took a deep breath, reaching for his own silence. “At least now we can try to make a real difference, eh?”

“I thought we were making a difference on Lothal,” Kanan said, trying not to sound bitter and angry.

He must have succeeded because Zeb just continued on. “Yeah, but out here, with Phoenix Squadron, we can make more of an impact.” He smiled for what had to be the first time since he had piloted that transport back from Lega, Jak unconscious and bleeding in his seat. “More bang for your cred, you know?”

Kanan raised his glass and grinned back gamely. “I’ll drink to that.” But he didn’t.

He let Zeb talk, drink a little more ale, hash out the mission all over again because he had to. Kanan remembered doing the same thing after a battle, no matter the outcome. Learn from your mistakes…

“Sato has sent out word to the rest of the fleet. Hopefully no one else’ll be that—”

“Zeb,” Kanan stopped him. “Not your fault.”

“Yeah,” Zeb grumbled. He sipped at his third ale. If he didn’t stop, Kanan would cut him off at four. “Yeah.”

Kanan did what was needed, what he wanted to do: he sat in silence with his friend. Zeb had more in common with Phoenix Squadron than he did with the crew of the _Ghost_ in a lot of ways. He’d been part of a vanquished army, one that collapsed under superior firepower and not its own machinations. 

Not an army that had turned on its leaders and eaten itself alive like the Republic, or pointed its soldiers’ weapons back on them like the Imperial Academy. Even Hera’s father and his Free Ryloth movement had “risen above” concerns so petty as love and family…

Kanan set his own mostly full drink aside, knowing alcohol wouldn’t help his mindset.

All these years, with Hera and the others, he’d never felt like they were fighting a war. Skirmishes, smash and grabs, slapping the Empire in the face and running away, sure. But all this? This was too much like the regular army for him to stomach easily.

“It’s strange,” Zeb murmured, as if reading Kanan’s mind. “Being on a ship like this. With soldiers again.”

“Yeah,” Kanan agreed. “It’s definitely different.”

“Hera’s in her element.”

Kanan couldn’t do more than nod at that.

Hera was happy here. She was a natural born leader—had been at the tender age of eighteen when he’d met her. And now she was finally able to do what it was _she_ needed to do, to excel at what was, really, her life’s work. It was selfish to want her to turn her back on this, to run away with him and go back to their scrappy existence.

And yet, that was all he wanted. He didn’t want to fight like this again.

Zeb must have sensed his hesitation because he dropped the line of conversation and continued in a brighter tone. “What’s say we go home and make Sabine cook us that bantha stew of hers? These rebels may know how to fight, but not a one of them can cook.”

Kanan’s mouth was suddenly full of the taste of stale ration bars flavored with dust and he all but leapt to his feet. “Sounds good to me,” he said, gripping Zeb’s shoulder as they headed out.

“Kanan,” Zeb said seriously. “Thanks. For… listening.”

“Any time.”

Zeb looked at him carefully. “You might think about talking a little more, though,” he said carefully. “To Hera, if not to the rest of us.”

And Kanan didn’t know what to say to that so, as usual lately, he just said nothing.

************

tbc...


	3. The future burns the bitter wish

Hera heard his door open again, as it always did at night now. Heard him quietly pad aft—never forward. Never toward her. The turret? or the galley? she wondered for the four seconds it took Kanan’s bare foot to hit the first rung of the ladder.

“Turret it is,” she murmured sadly.

What was she talking about? Chopper wanted to know. The turret had nothing to do with the records search they were running.

“Just…” Hera sighed. “Never mind. Just look for any sign of Imperial traffic in that sector.”

Hera sat back in her pilot’s chair. She didn’t have to sit here—they were tethered to _Phoenix Home_ after all. There was the common area, her room and the desk there. There was Kanan’s room…

But she hadn’t really been invited in there for a while. Not since a couple of days after he’d returned from the _Nyaga An_. Four weeks was a long time not to see the inside of his cabin.

She’d tried to talk to him, but he was always ready with a quip or a gentle but quelling word. He wasn’t good at being mad at her, was even worse at _staying_ mad. This wasn’t anger. It wasn’t even fear in any sense she’d ever seen it from him. This was something different.

Hera sighed, looking out at the frigate they were moored to. Everything was different now. And mostly, except for Kanan’s strange silence, everything was good. After so long fighting in the dark alone, it was heartening to know how much the rebellion had already done against the Empire. How much _they_ could do, now that the _Ghost’s_ crew had joined them.

Now that she had joined them.

She wasn’t blind and never had been. Sabine and Kanan had reservations, she knew that. She even, sort of, knew why. But the past was the past and as painful as it was, it was the future they needed to concentrate on. If they didn’t, then every kid in the galaxy could be that nine-year-old Twi’lek she’d been, weeping over the grave of her mother.

Ezra and Zeb seemed better about it all. Ezra was as adaptable as a Talatook, thank the Force, and as much as she knew he wanted to get back home to Lothal, as worried as he was about Kanan, too, he understood the importance of what they were doing here. Zeb, she thought, really was a soldier at heart, and the structure of Commander Sato’s squadron appealed to him. Destroying the Empire outpost by outpost appealed to him even more.

And Hera herself? In a lot of ways, she thought she was born to this.

 _“To raise you in peace,_ keella _, that would have been my wish.”_

Her mother’s words floated in her mind, that rich voice barely remembered. Her father once told her she sounded like her mother. Kanan told her she had a voice to die for, so maybe what her father said was true. 

_“But if we cannot raise you in peace, we will raise you for justice.”_

Her father had certainly done that. And now she was here, somewhere where she could really make a difference.

She’d just thought Kanan would be by her side.

“This is ridiculous,” she muttered. 

It was, Chopper agreed. They were never going to find anything useful in these records. Why was he even wasting his time?

“Keep looking, Chop,” she told him, rising and stretching. One day soon, she’d get a full night’s sleep. “I’ll be back.”

She walked quietly, hoping the rest of the crew was sleeping, and at the bottom of the turret ladder she stopped. 

“Want some caf?” she asked, keeping her voice neutral. She wouldn’t beg.

“No, thank you,” he replied, soft and gentle as ever, but detached. 

“Will you ever?” she whispered. And she walked on to the galley. 

Two minutes later, he walked in the door. 

“Changed my mind,” he murmured. 

He slid into one of the seats and Hera could feel him watching her. The caf made, she put a mug in front of him and kept the other for herself.

“Kanan,” she began, only to be cut off.

“I’m sorry, Hera,” he told her, truth ringing in the words, though it made no difference. “This isn’t about you.”

“Then what is it about?” she asked. “You aren’t sleeping, you aren’t _talking_. I think you only train with Ezra now because you’re the only one who can.”

Kanan shook his head at that. 

“Kanan, what happened to you?” Okay, maybe she _would_ beg.

He sipped his caf. “It’s not about what happened,” he said finally. “It’s about what’s happening.”

Hera sighed. He could sound as confusing as any sage when he wanted to. “And what’s happening?”

“Things are changing.” He smiled a cold, tiny smile. A fearful smile. “I don’t like change.”

“Things could be getting better,” she pointed out, knowing there was much more to this story than he was letting on. There always had to be a better somewhere, right?

“They could,” he allowed. 

Even she found the silence between them itchy and uncomfortable. But it stretched; like a child’s sweet stick, long and cloying and tenacious. Normally, the silence was her tool. He couldn’t keep things in. But right now, it seemed like he couldn’t get things out.

“When you figure it out, will you talk to me?” she asked. It was all she could do. 

And he looked up at her with all the affection in the world. And all the pain and confusion. She realized that he really did have no idea what he thought about things right now. “You know I will.”

She stood and dropped a kiss on his hair, and took her caf back to the cockpit. Whatever had happened on Tarkin’s destroyer, it wasn’t over. Kanan was afraid and he didn’t even know what he was afraid of. And she couldn’t help him with that.

And that hurt more than she could say. If he would just _talk_ to her...

It was a long time before the common area door slid open, but, no matter what she wanted, his quiet steps took him back to his room.

 _“You know I will,”_ he’d said.

But right now, she didn’t.

***********

tbc....


	4. To ashes as it flies

Commander Sato’s voice was tinny over the hologram that Chopper projected into the _Ghost_ ’s cockpit.

“This mission is one of utmost importance, Phoenix Squadron,” he was saying, sounding serious and weighty. Sabine shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “The fate of a planet may well hang in the balance. It is our duty to succeed. If we cannot deliver these supplies and diminish the Empire’s control of Nialna, they will be lost.”

 _“The people of this planet will welcome the light of the Empire.”_ her mind reminded her, the old words sounding eerily familiar in the present.

“Man you positions and prepare to make your jumps,” Commander Sato finished grandly. “And may the Force be with us.”

Sabine saw Kanan tighten up a little at that. She knew Hera saw it too, but… But Hera and Kanan didn’t seem to be talking much these days. That in itself was disturbing.

“Okay, everybody,” Hera said as hyperspace enveloped them. “It’s five hours to Nialna. I want everybody sharp. Punching through that blockade isn’t going to be easy.”

Sabine nodded and made her way out, following Zeb and hearing Ezra and Kanan follow her. Kanan, who should be staying with Hera for a few minutes together, like he used to. The crew of the _Ghost_ had done a lot of good in the last six weeks, but something had gone fundamentally wrong with _them_.

With a sigh, she headed for her room and surveyed the canvas that was her quarters. Painting didn’t appeal. What she was feeling was too dark to live on her walls, to poison the _Ghost_ like that. She grabbed a sketchbook and crawled up to her upper bunk.

The rounded generator of the Duchess formed under her pencil. Like everything Sabine did, she acknowledged to herself, the weapon was beautiful. Beautiful destruction. 

_“You are the best and the brightest,” Commander Garrison had proclaimed, staring down at his prized pupils. “With your help, the Empire will bring order to the Outer Rim. We will bring peace, prosperity.”_

A star destroyer, sketchy and quick, but Tarkin’s in her mind, grew organically from the Duchess, the swirls of Lothal revolving below. Her thoughts disjointed, and under her hand an image of Ketsu appeared. Another dark time. The things she’d done… There was no real way to make amends. Off to the left of the rest, the Wren family crest drew itself in perfect detail, always.

_“Wren, you are an asset to Mandalore,” Garrison purred in her ear. “An asset to the Empire.”_

“I’m a traitor,” she whispered. And a rebel.

But was she this army’s rebel? Her pencil making its own decisions, she watched the _Ghost_ nestle into the space between her family crest and Lothal, as if leading her from one home to another.

This—Phoenix Squadron, Sato’s war—this was what Hera had been looking for. A community. Like-minded freedom fighters to support her work. To make her feel that much less alone. 

And in part, Sabine wanted that, too. But hadn’t she had enough of war? She was born to it, bred to it, but when it got right _down_ to it…

All she wanted to do was sheer off from the fleet and strike out on their own again. Fight with her family—fight _for_ her family. She just wasn’t sure she was a soldier anymore, not like Sato needed. Wasn’t sure she could ever be again.

The sharp, cunning head of the starbird stuck out from behind the _Ghost_ , dogging its steps.

 _The starbird’s death, so long foretold,_ _  
_ _Et whole by fire and pain._ _  
_ _And yet in that rich nova bold,_   
The starbird rose to live again.

Hera wasn’t leaving Phoenix Squadron. That much was obvious. As the weeks went on, Ezra had stopped asking about returning to Lothal, about going home. Kanan had stopped talking altogether, or nearly, right about the time Sabine had finally thought that, against all odds, they were whole again.

Anger flooded her for a second and she sent her sketchbook slamming toward the door—

—which opened as the book reached it, revealing Kanan, who snatched the offending projectile out of the air.

“If you didn’t want to eat, you could have just said so,” he commented in quiet amusement. Almost like himself.

Sabine sighed. “Sorry,” she apologized, climbing down from her bunk. “Guess I’m feeling a little frustrated.”

Kanan looked at the stream of mind sketch and nodded. “I see that.”

“Can I ask you a question?” she said, rushing in before she lost the chance.

Kanan looked wary, but stepped farther into her room. “This hasn’t been ending well for me lately, but… yes.”

“Would you leave the _Ghost_?”

He stood still for a long moment and fear took the place of her anger. “You would. Wouldn’t you?” _Then_ what would they do? They’d just got him back!

But then he breathed and he looked at her with that small, proud smile that reminded her that they were _family_.

“I’d never leave, Sabine,” he promised. And he _was_ actually promising her. “I may not agree with… any of this. But where the _Ghost_ goes—where you all go—I go.”

Sabine had a desperate desire to hug him, so she did. Kanan wrapped his arms around her and she was instantly warmer. “I wish we were on Lothal,” she whispered.

Kanan squeezed her tight, then loosened his hold. “I know. Me, too.” He pulled her away from him gently and looked into her eyes. “But we _are_ making a difference here, whether it’s the difference we thought we would or not.” 

“Yeah,” Sabine agreed, nodding. 

“Come on. Leftover rycrit stew.”

“Yuck.” She hated rycrit. “I’ll just make myself something.”

“Your choice,” he said blithely. And then he caught her eyes seriously. “It is, you know? It’s always been your choice.”

To stay or to go. Yeah. “Where you all go, I go,” she promised.

“Good.” He smiled easily and she realized that this was the most words she’d heard him say in days.

“So,” she began again, very quietly, as they walked toward the noise that was Ezra, Zeb, and Chopper carrying on in the galley. “Hera?”

Kanan sighed. “We’re working on it.”

Sabine shook her head. “You’d better. Talking is a good start.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“You’re hopeless.”

Kanan gave her a smile as they walked into the galley. “I’ve heard that, too.”

***********

tbc...


	5. The present burns between them both

Kanan never did talk to Hera, regardless of the discussion he and Sabine had. The Inquisitor’s words still invaded both dreams and meditation, but he was learning to sleep through enough of the former to function and feel past enough of the latter to train his apprentice. The anxiety that simmered daily, though, reinforced by the environment around them, wasn’t something he could even put into words. He just knew on an instinctive, if not a Force, level that this was the wrong place for him to be right now and that something, eventually, was going to give. 

But he wasn’t going to let it. Kanan knew he loved Hera—he’d known it for years. He was even mostly sure she loved him back. More than mostly sure. Almost certain. But if asked to make a choice between the fight that had consumed her life and him...? And of course there was the fact that the family would be forced to choose and he’d made them sacrifice enough for him, hadn’t he?

So Kanan did what he had to do. He sucked it up. Yes, the anxiety crawled under his skin every time they had a “high-level meeting,” every time “procedure dictated,” every time “the rebellion was counting on them,” but he let it mellow to a sort of mild resentment and moved on.

He worked very hard at remembering how to ignore what he was feeling, to put aside the racing heart when he woke from that damn Pau’an and his predictions of how things would go when he finally broke, the images placed in his mind weeks ago of what would happen to Hera and the others if he didn’t. It was taking a while, but he was getting there. At the very least, he was faking it enough to let everyone else think things were returning to normal.

He’d maybe even convinced Ezra that he was getting better. That was a coup. Or it meant their bond wasn’t nearly strong enough to survive whatever lay ahead…

Kanan was never going to be a good little soldier again, but at least he was toeing the line.

And then, suddenly, more than two months after he’d watched the Inquisitor fall to his death, after running a dozen ops with all of Phoenix squadron in attendance or the team split up entirely (and Kanan honestly couldn’t say which one was worse), after watching Ahsoka and Sato start to eye Hera for some sort of official position in their growing army (which was _definitely_ worse than both of the previous situations), light dawned and hope sprang anew.

The _Ghost_ , on her own, on a raid to pillage a little booty from the Empire. Who could ask for more?

“Coming in at 3-4-2!” Hera called.

Kanan rotated the turret and sighted. “Got ‘em.” And then he did, watching both TIEs explode under his guns. He was under heavy fire and was the most relaxed he’d been in weeks.

“Hera,” Sabine warned, “there are suddenly an _awful_ lot more TIEs than we were expecting.”

“I noticed that,” Hera commented evenly. The ship rocked hard around them as a fighter got in a lucky shot. “Chop, lock that stabilizer down.” A burst of rude binary met her. “You’re not too busy to make sure the ship doesn’t blow up around you, are you?” she snapped back.

“Two more coming around your side, Ezra,” Zeb called out. He had that disgruntled cast to his voice that he always had when he wasn’t one of the people with a gun in his hands. 

“I see ‘em.” 

Kanan spun the turret seat forward, watching one TIE explode. The second spun up and around and Kanan himself just missed picking it off. Sabine caught it with the aft gun and he breathed a quick sigh of relief.

“Ezra,” Hera called. “Target the maglock just aft of the freighter’s cargo.”

“Done,” Ezra replied. The cargo slipped free with the aid of his blast, the ship’s momentum pushing it away from its resting place, but Kanan barely saw it. He was suddenly busy with three more TIEs. Even as they swarmed his area, he could sense more of them deviling Sabine and Ezra.

“Ready to sweep her in,” Zeb called. “Get us a little—”

“Kriff!” Ezra yelled.

The entire ship canted up at the front from a hit on their belly and Hera shrieked. Kanan felt her pain through the Force for a half second before she passed out.

At least he hoped she passed out.

“HERA!” Ezra. Scared.

“Forget the cargo, Zeb—” Kanan demanded.

“—cargo secured,” Zeb called at the same moment.

Chopper started cursing more colorfully, asking why no one was here to help because Hera was down. She was _down_ and he didn’t want that. “Get to the forward guns. Ezra—”

“I’m here,” Ezra replied, trying and failing to be calm. “The main panel overloaded.”

Kanan closed his eyes and tried to breathe. Burns, shrapnel; slices and scars….

“Kanan, I need help!” 

Sabine’s cry had him shaking himself and turning his attention back to the TIEs around them.

“Chop, get us out of here!” he cried, knowing that the cargo, the dogfight, the mission, _none of it_ was going to matter if Hera was…

No. There it was: a soft whisper of light, instantly recognizable in the Force as the _Ghost_ launched into hyperspace. “Hera?” he murmured.

“She’s coming around,” Ezra confirmed. 

Kanan slid down the ladder and pelted down the hall, Sabine on his heels.

“Lay still for a minute, Hera,” Ezra was saying, as Zeb pushed past Kanan and went for the aid kit in the common room. 

Hera lay half in Ezra’s lap, her face looking not at all as mangled as Kanan’s mind had made it out to be. She _was_ bleeding, in a few places, in fact, but there were no deadly burns or killing shrapnel.

“They broke my ship,” she muttered.

The outrage in her voice, though soft and unsteady, left Kanan weak as he slid to his knees next to her. Ezra relinquished his hold willingly, moving to the side as Kanan cradled Hera and Sabine took the aid kit from Zeb and started trying to work in the small space.

“She’s in good enough shape to get us back to the fleet,” Kanan promised her. The only time he was glad for the kriffing fleet and its kriffing Peltas.

Hera balked at Sabine’s treatment of her wounds and tried to rise. After a moment, Kanan helped her into her chair but would let her go no further. “The cargo?” she asked, careful not to move her head. 

“Zeb got it. It’s not as important as you,” Kanan said firmly. He held her hands tight, telling himself it was so she wouldn’t interfere with Sabine’s work. That he knew it was because he was scared to let go was something he kept to himself.

And yet, Hera knew, of course. “I’m okay, Kanan,” she told him roughly, hissing in pain as Sabine cleaned one of the wounds on her face. “Breathe.”

Kanan chuckled at that, the sound rocky. “I’m not the one we were worried about.”

“I don’t know,” Sabine retorted, obviously calmed by what she saw as she worked. “I was a little afraid you’d pass out and fall on top of her.”

Kanan glared a moment, but he couldn’t mean it. Panic was brewing, but at least it was flavored by the expected worry for Hera instead of by memories and images he couldn’t control.

“We really needed that cargo,” Hera argued. Her words were becoming more slurred and Kanan, recognizing the slightly confused look in her eyes, started examining her lekku for damage.

“We really need our pilot,” Zeb reminded her.

Chopper informed them that they would be in hyperspace for another 4 hours and 47 minutes. And that he was glad he wouldn’t have to deal with the rest of them without Hera to control them.

Hera laughed at that and then yelped in pain as Kanan’s hand brushed gently over a large bruise a quarter of the way down her left lek. He tilted her head up to check her eyes and Hera leaned into the movement. Her eyes tracked almost normally. Probably not as serious as it looked. Certainly not as bad as it had been the last time.

“Let’s get you to your cabin,” he suggested. Hera stood very carefully, expecting him to balance her as she wobbled, which of course he did. 

“I’m okay,” she repeated.

“And have a splitting headache, a bunch of cuts, and a bruised lek which I’m sure hurts like flint,” Sabine said sharply. And then she smiled. “We’ve got the rest of it, Hera,” she promised, giving Kanan a very significant look. “Let Kanan take care of you for now.”

Hera looked up at him and smiled. “I think I can do that.”

The silence that reigned after her pronouncement lasted until they were in her cabin alone and he’d gotten her settled on her side on her bed. A bruised lek was, literally, getting part of your brain cudgeled, and Hera was pretty sure she was going to throw up soon.

“Kanan,” she warned.

“It’s okay,” he murmured. His hand shook against her skin where he rubbed her back, trying to soothe. “I have a basin ready just in case.”

Of course he did. They’d done this before, though the injury had been much more serious the last time. Last time it hadn’t been a blown panel but a fair-sized bomb, and part of her lek had been caught in the rubble.

“It’s not that bad this time,” she whispered. Her head hurt; her head and her face and her brain. Her lek felt like it had been rubbed raw. She focused on the feeling of Kanan shaking at her back. 

“I know,” he replied. 

She suspected he didn’t really. But he turned on their small healing field generator—Sabine must have given it to him on the bridge—and started running it carefully along the injured brain tail. The heat of it warmed her and slowly, slowly, the desire to lose everything she’d eaten in the last week receded. The device didn’t have the power to heal her completely, but it would help until they could get back to the fleet. 

Hera started to drift as the worst of the pain abated. 

“Get some sleep,” Kanan whispered.

So she did.

She had no idea how long she’d slept before she woke to the feeling of Kanan touching her injury with a bare, badly tremored hand. 

“How long?” she asked. She felt a little better for the sleep, but her brain still felt stuffed with jonna seed.

“An hour ‘til we meet up with the fleet.”

His voice was rough, soft. Wrong.

“Kanan, I’m okay,” she whispered. Even feeling like she’d been smacked with a stone, she could tell that whatever had been going on with him was reaching a crisis point at the absolute worst time. “Kanan?”

She rolled over carefully and looked up at him, glad for what healing the generator had managed when only minor lightning shot through her as her lek touched the bed. He had moved his hand out of the way as she turned, but other than that he seemed frozen. She’d thought he was getting better, but this was _worse_ than he’d been in weeks.

His sudden words were a surprise.

“I thought us being out on our own would make things better,” he whispered.

Hera sat up, easing the pressure on her injured appendage. “What things, Kanan?” she asked, praying that this time, he could find the words.

“Something’s coming,” he said. “Everything we’ve done—everything you did to get me back. It’s all leading to something. Something we can’t be ready for.”

Hera let that sink into her pain-filled brain. “Another vision?” she asked finally.

Kanan shook his head, his face still blank. Scared. “I could lose all of you.” 

“Like they told you you would.” She didn’t make it a question. There was no reason to. Why didn’t she figure this out before? 

His eyes snapped into focus on her face and Hera smiled.

“I haven’t had the pleasure of a full interrogation, but I’ve been captured before,” she reminded him.

“Talion,” he murmured. His eyes started to go glassy again and she grabbed his hand to recapture his attention.

“It’s everything they told me then,” she admitted. “You and Zeb were going to be captured any minute. They’d kill you if I didn’t tell them everything.” She closed her eyes against a remembered panic she could never forget. “They’d torture you to death in front of me.”

Kanan’s hand gripped hers harder in sympathy, and when he spoke, his voice was rough.

“They’d’ve killed you if I told them where to find you. I knew that—that wasn’t even a threat. If they’d gotten Ezra…” he barely breathed.

She could just imagine what the Inquisitor had threatened, given Kanan’s fears about his apprentice. They’d torture him, turn him, destroy him...

“It’s what they do, love,” she reminded him, wishing her brain didn’t throb so badly. Wishing she’d never let them keep him so long—never let them take him in the first place. “But it didn’t happen.”

“But it could.” This was so unlike her Kanan. She didn’t know what the Inquisitor had done to him, but this wasn’t him.

“Kanan, I’ve been terrified of losing you since about two weeks after I met you.”

“Two weeks?” he asked, blinking and trying _so hard_ for something like blithe outrage. “I didn’t think it would take that long.”

“I had to look past your attitude,” she shot back. Regardless of the healing field generator, she knew her body wasn’t up to hashing this all out. “But if you don’t care for something enough to be that terrified, you don’t need it anyway.” She looked up at him, aware that her focus was slipping.

Damn it, why couldn’t they have better timing? In everything?

“I need you,” she said sincerely. 

“You need to rest,” he said, trying to shake himself out of the fear. Out of the discussion. Cover it up as he’d obviously been doing while she was stupidly thinking he’d been getting better.

Pain or not, she couldn’t let that happen or he’d just slide back into his silence and rot there.

“Fear is _their_ currency, Kanan,” she told him fiercely. “The Empire. The Dark Side.” She reached up a hand she knew was shaking and trailed it down his cheek. “You’ve bought it, but it isn’t worth anything.”

Kanan turned his head and kissed her hand softly. She let him guide her down to lie on her side again, but only because she knew he’d slide in behind her, carefully draping her damaged lek over his own shoulder to keep it safe.

“If I lost you,” he whispered. “Any of you. All of you…” Tears unexpectedly seeped into his voice and Hera’s heart broke for him. He never cried. Not really. She had the thought once that Kanan Jarrus had cried all his tears when his master died. Maybe he _did_ have a few left after all. “I can’t do that again.”

And that was the answer. The key Hera had been trying to find since he’d returned from Mustafar and fallen into silence. The one thing the Inquisitor could have used to break him.

“You survived your master’s death,” she whispered. She didn’t ask, but instead made sure he knew she knew what had happened. “I know he made you go through it again, but you _survived_. And you knew even when he threatened the same for Ezra that he could survive it, too.”

“I couldn’t let him stay. At the tower.” He was silent a long moment. “Ezra would have been stronger.”

Hera wasn’t sure what he meant, but it didn’t matter. “Kanan, you are stronger than you think.”

He didn’t believe that in the least. She sometimes wondered if there’d ever been a time when he did.

“ _We’re_ stronger than you think, too,” she continued. “Whatever happens, we’ll face it the way we always do. The way we do best. Together.”

“We’re dropping out of hyperspace in fifteen minutes,” Sabine said very quietly over the comms. “How’s Hera?”

“Hera’s doing fine,” she answered for herself, feeling Kanan pull away at the interruption. She’d lost her chance to really fix this. Damn their timing, anyway.

“That’s good to hear,” Sabine replied, still quiet, but tender and relieved. “We should be docking with _Phoenix Home_ soon.”

Kanan spoke, his voice controlled, tears gone. Like it never happened, or he didn’t want it to have happened. “You need to go back to sleep,” he ordered her gently. “Let us know when the medical bay is ready for her,” he asked Sabine.

“Will do,” she replied, a smile in her voice.

“Kanan,” Hera began, knowing she couldn’t recapture the silence that had let his words out. But she had to try.

“I hear you,” he told her. “And I’m working on it.” He carefully nuzzled the back of her head, which only hurt her lek a little. “Having you here helps.”

“Well that’s good, because I plan to stay,” she promised.

For as long as she possibly could.

***********

tbc...


	6. With fire all its own

“Each being is unique.” Kanan’s voice was calm and soft. His Jedi voice, used almost exclusively for teaching. Since Mustafar, It was almost the only time Kanan talked at all. “With focus, you can learn to pick a single person out of a crowd of thousands.”

That wasn’t entirely fair, Ezra realized. Kanan was getting better. He was. Especially after that smash and grab last month when Hera had been hurt. Maybe that had scared the scared out of him.

“Ezra, are you paying any attention at all?”

That was Kanan’s disapproving Dad voice. Nice to know that wasn’t entirely gone.

“I am,” Ezra promised. Sort of. “Pick a person’s Force signature out of a crowd.”

“Uh huh,” Kanan grumbled. “Find Sabine.”

Ezra popped his eyes open and immediately Kanan grabbed his arm and kept him in place. They were standing in the cargo area of the _Ghost_ and Sabine wasn’t on board. 

“With the Force,” Kanan commanded.

“I’m not even sure where she is,” Ezra complained. “She might not even be on _Phoenix Home._ ” The _Ghost_ was moored to the command ship, but all of them had occasionally gone from ship to ship for various reasons. There were always shuttles popping around the fleet when they were in normal space.

“You know her,” Kanan continued. “You can find her. Close your eyes and see the shape of her.”

Ezra blushed and Kanan’s voice took on an amused tone. “Not physical, Ezra. The shape she makes in the Force.”

She did make one, kind of. “She’s colorful,” he murmured, looking for the bright spark that he felt when she was around. He wasn’t sure how to navigate.

“Distance isn’t a concern,” Kanan told him, as if reading his mind. “Open yourself fully and you can feel someone at the far end of the fleet.”

 _But not all the way to Mustafar,_ Ezra’s mind supplied. Or could he have? If he’d worked harder before all this happened, would he have been able to feel Kanan all that way? Would he be able to do it now?

“Just set her in your mind and let the Force guide you.”

“Right.” Ezra tried. Deep breath in, deep breath out… 

Sabine was strong. Color and sarcasm. And pain… guilt… White walls and familiar corridors...

“She’s on _Home_ ,” he said finally.

“Good,” Kanan murmured. “Where?”

That was harder. “How do I…” He trailed off as he felt something. “There’s space around her. Cold air…” White on one side and deep, deep black on the other…. “The landing bay.” His eyes popped open again to see Kanan smiling proudly next to him. “She’s in the landing bay!”

“You’re getting it.” Kanan’s approval was a rush of warmth in the Force between them. “With practice, you can track even people you’re not close to.”

“Strangers?” That was… weird.

“That’s a very high level skill,” Kanan said. “More... people you have some sort of connection with, even if it’s small.” He looked left, toward the airlock that tied them to the other ship. “Commander Sato?”

Ezra blinked his disbelief. “I barely know him. How could I follow him?”

“What was your first impression of him?” Kanan leaned against the cargo bay wall, watching him. “A person’s first impression can be fixed in your mind so you can try to find them later, if you need to.”

What _was_ his first impression? “Stern,” Ezra said finally. “And… sad.”

Kanan nodded, eyes flashing with approval again, though he was serious. “Determined,” Kanan added. “Vengeful, almost. He’s lost a lot to the Empire. More than he can bear without striking out.”

“I know all about that,” Ezra murmured.

“I know you do, Ezra,” Kanan said gently. “I’m sorry.”

Ezra shook his head. “No, not me.” It was his turn to watch his companion carefully. “You and Sabine. It’s part of how I see you when I… feel you, I guess. Zeb, especially. Even Hera.” He rubbed the back of his head in embarrassment. “I guess that doesn't make any sense.”

“It makes all the sense in the world, Ezra.” 

Kanan pushed off from the wall and stepped forward, gripping Ezra’s shoulder. The sadness flowed between them with the rest of Kanan, as it always did. The fear was still there, strong and brittle at once, but less than it used to be, and Ezra took heart in that.

“I told you, before all that happened, that we’d all had loss. It shapes you, carves into your being.” He smiled and dropped his hand, leaving Ezra’s shoulder cold. “I felt it when I sensed you on that roof in Capital City. But you don’t make the same impression in the Force that you made when I first felt you.”

Ezra thought back to the first time he’d felt Kanan. Before he even knew who he was.

“You were happier then,” he said without thinking. Kanan froze and Ezra looked up at him, breaking eye contact immediately as he saw what his words had done. Why couldn’t he keep his mouth shut?

“A lot has happened since then,” Kanan admitted after a long beat. “But, Ezra?” 

Ezra looked up again, and the fear and sadness were gone. Affection took their place. 

“You’re not the reason.”

“But if you hadn’t found me on Lothal—”

“If I hadn’t found you on Lothal, the last year would have been different,” he agreed. “Lesser. Poorer.” He touched Ezra again, the hand on his shoulder prodding him to face his master. “Ezra, I don’t know why the Force led us to each other, but training you has made me better.” He smiled, and Ezra couldn’t help but smile back. “I wouldn’t change any of it.”

Ezra snorted. “Really?”

The skin-to-skin touch intensified the rush of fear and anxiety from Kanan, and Ezra was almost sorry he’d spoken. Again.

But then the anxiety drained away, a little, and the fear receded. And Ezra could tell, somehow, that that was because of him. Because he was here. 

“Maybe some of it,” Kanan admitted.

The moment passed them by quickly, but it was another to store away.

“Now,” Kanan asked, lounging back against the wall again. “How about Zeb?”

Ezra closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and went searching for his friend.

************

**One week later**

The space above the desert planet of Kilka sparked with laser blasts, silent as wraiths until they hit a target and exploded.

“Phoenix-1, report!” Hera called. Kanan was manning the top turret as always. Chopper was controlling the nose gun, but the tail gun was silent. Kanan was wishing the whole _Ghost_ contingent was here, but the _Phantom_ and Ezra, Sabine, and Zeb were all planetside.

“Thanks for the assist, _Ghost_.” Phoenix-1 sounded shaken, but okay. His A-Wing had seen better days though. Kanan examined it through the canopy of the top turret, watching Jak’s droid trying desperately to lock things down. Kanan wondered how long that ship would be out of service.

 _We can’t afford to lose many more_ , he thought, before a knee-jerk reaction hit him. _It’s the fleet’s problem, not mine._

“Need another assist back to base?” Hera asked, ever the helper.

 _That’s bitter, Kanan,_ he told himself. _This is what she_ does _, no matter where she is._

Which was true. But she used to do it with them. 

The bitterness had been growing as his anxiety receded. He no longer woke _every_ night to nightmares. He even slept through to ship’s dawn more often than he didn’t. But the grating irritation of being where they were was building, and he didn’t seem to be able to stop himself from feeding it with his own endless sarcasm.

“I think R9’s got it, _Ghost_ ,” Jak replied. “We’ve got hyperdrive back, but I lost my cannon. If that patrol was on a check-in schedule, you might have less time than you thought for this mission. Go pick up your kids.”

They’d become the running joke in the Rebel Cell: The quirky little family who fights the Empire together, in between holo nights and sit-down last meals.

He could almost feel Master Windu glaring at him for his inappropriate thoughts. Master Windu could take a hike.

“Will do,” Hera replied. “Get home and get safe. Tell Commander Sato we’ll be along soon.” Her voice was light and accomplished and happy.

 _Hera’s happy._ For most of his adult life, that was all Kanan had really wanted. Something was deeply wrong that he was starting to resent her happiness.

Jak jetted off into hyperspace and Hera turned the _Ghost_ down toward the heat-blasted planet below them. 

It was another of the ops that were saving Kanan’s sanity, if barely. With Phoenix-1 as a lone escort, they’d sent the kid—sent Sabine and Ezra and Zeb off to explore an abandoned Republic stronghold in hopes of finding loot, while the _Ghost_ kept watch above. 

They even got to run into a random Imperial patrol, just to up the danger factor. Like the old days, almost. Kanan leaned into the rightness of it and listened to comms, not ready to climb down the ladder and face reality again quite yet.

“ _Ghost_ to _Phantom_ ,” Hera called confidently. “Spectre-5, come in.”

“Spectre-5 here.” Sabine was happy too. Mostly. “All clear up there?”

_Everybody’s happy._

_Ouch. Sarcasm,_ he chided himself, though he didn’t really feel it. _Perhaps not the most attractive quality in a Jedi Master_. 

Master Kenobi had always seemed full of it. Never got him in trouble. _You’ll never be a Master anyway, so who’s gonna tell?_

“For now,” Hera allowed. “You might want to hurry things along.”

“You might want to come down and help,” Zeb broke in. “Looks like the place was just dropped on a moment’s notice. Phoenix Cell is going to get a nice little bonus out of this one.”

Kanan wondered idly what the market price on the loot was. Cash it in, head back to Lothal…

No. No, Lothal still wasn’t an option. It was becoming more and more militarized, Kanan had heard through the Rebel network. Kallus was all but running the place. That _Kanan_ had heard it through the rebel network was part of the problem.

He didn’t sign on for intrigue and espionage. Smash and grab was more his speed, or so he liked to tell himself. He wasn’t a crusader.

_Truth is the power of the Force. The Force is truth._

Kanan shook his head. Right this second, the truth could join Master Windu on that long walk.

“Kanan?” Hera sounded like she’d called him before, and Kanan reviewed his inactive memories of the last two minutes. Yep. She called in twice.

“Sorry,” he replied. “I was meditating.”

Truth, Windu, walking.

“Would you like to meditate on joining me in some supply gathering?” she asked, sounding non-military, non-serious, non-rebellion... so like herself that he couldn’t help but smile.

“Sounds like a plan,” he replied, trying to sound as happy as everyone else. And he should be, right? _This_ was what they did. Who _they_ , the crew of the _Ghost_ , were. “Be down in a second.”

“I thought maybe you fell asleep up there,” Hera joked as he hustled down to the cockpit. But she wasn’t really joking. 

Since he’d broken down in her cabin, Kanan really had been trying. When he woke in the night these days, he went forward, not aft. And while he probably wasn’t saying any more to her now than he had before, the proximity of the two of them was therapy all its own. The terror of what could happen and what had happened and what was happening was all getting better.

So why wasn’t he as settled and happy as everyone else?

“Nope,” he answered her blithely. “Just waiting for something interesting to happen.”

Hera snorted. “Because a random squad of TIEs isn’t interesting enough.”

“Are you guys coming down here?” Ezra asked over the comms. “Zeb’s not kidding, this place is full.”

Kanan smiled. Ezra helped too. And Sabine and Zeb. No matter what came next, at least they’d all be together, right?

“We’re on our way, Spectre-6,” Hera assured him.

Kanan settled back and tried to silence his bitterness. The fleet was ten parsecs away—far enough for him to forget about them and focus on the now. Right now, it was just them.

Time to revel in the _present_.

*******

But the present, it turned out, looked a lot like the past.

Kanan and Hera landed quickly, just outside the large cave entrance that had once housed a dozen Republic gunships. The blasted hulks of two of them lay in ruins outside, the bodies of the soldiers burned and dust long, long ago.

Didn’t make the memory of the feeling as the ships swayed and swooped when they flew any less sharp. 

“We’d better get moving,” Hera called, as Zeb exited the main building that was nestled inside the huge cavern. He pushed two crates toward the _Phantom_. “That squad we ran into probably radioed in before we took care of them.”

Sabine moved a little faster as she came out of the landing bay, pushing what looked like a mostly intact hyperdrive. She headed toward the _Ghost_ , seeing the _Phantom_ nearly full.

“What do you expect to do with that?” Kanan asked her. Hera was headed for the pile of crates Ezra was working on.

Sabine smiled. “I don’t know yet—depends on which of the A-Wings loses its hyperdrive first.”

Kanan swallowed any response he might have made and went to help Ezra and Hera load booty. Scavenging for the rebellion wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he left Gorse.

He shook his head, clearing his thoughts. Why was this such a problem anyway? 

_Because you’ve been here before._

He looked around the base, feeling the history to it. Ancient history. History that included the unequivocal death of not just the Jedi, or the hundreds of civilizations the Empire was intent on crushing, or even the billions of sentients who had been ground under the war machine, but the death of some universal truth. That light could win out.

He’d found that truth, or at least the hope that it _could_ be found, in the years since he’d met Hera. Since they’d begun to build this crew. But since Mustafar, Kanan had lost that truth entirely.

Even now, his soul finally healing from the trauma of his imprisonment, he had no idea how to get it back. And that, more than anything, proved to him that he should not be here.

“There’s still some medical supplies inside,” Sabine called, sprinting back toward the main structure. “Be back in a sec.”

“Sabine, we don’t have time—” Kanan argued, but she was already gone.

“I’ll be back in a sec,” she repeated over the comms.

“Chop, any sign of more company?” Hera called practically. She watched Zeb pack the last possible carton into the _Phantom_. “Kanan, dock the phantom so we can move quickly.”

Without worrying about being split into two ships, Kanan finished for her. He nodded and threaded his way through the boxes to raise the _Phantom_ into the air. Chopper announced that, as yet, there were no other crafts in the area, and Kanan docked quickly, dropping back into the _Ghost_ and out the cargo hold.

Ezra and Zeb were pushing more crates into the bay.

And Kanan felt it. Ezra froze solid and their eyes locked. _Sabine_.

“Something’s—”

Ezra’s comment was blown apart by an explosion that took out the front of the main building.

“Sabine!” Hera’s comm call was clipped and terrified. And not answered. “Sabine, come in. Now.”

Dust rolled out toward them, even as the four of them strode toward the rubble. Kanan took as deep a breath as he dared in the thick atmosphere and reached out through the Force to look for the powerful, paint-streaked light that was Sabine, blowing out his breath in relief. Alive, awake, and angry.

“Do you feel her, Ezra?” he asked. He would give his apprentice exactly eight seconds, but he would give it to him. _Learning is best done in the moment_ , his master used to tell him.

Ezra closed his eyes, but his fists were tight balls of worry. His right hand rose, and after six seconds, he pointed in the direction Kanan was two seconds from heading. “There!”

***********

Sabine growled in frustration, trying to pry the long durasteel girder off her leg. 

“One more trip,” she grumbled at herself. “Just one more load of supplies. Who will it hurt? OW!” She fell back as her side screamed at her for trying to do the impossible. She wasn’t moving that girder without help. Which was going to have a hard time finding her with no comm, she thought, glaring at the bits of circuitry that she’d crushed as she fell.

She was really more angry at herself than anything. An explosives expert, a _Mandalorian_ , and she’d missed a trip wire. Seriously? 

“Republic must have left it when they abandoned the place,” she murmured to herself, glad the actual charge had been farther forward in the building instead of under her feet. “Hoping to catch the Seps in the blowback.”

“I wish they’d all stop doing that. Damn mines’ll be the death of the rebellion.”

Zeb’s voice was followed by a mighty shove that brought down half the wall behind her.

Kanan followed him in, kneeling beside her. “Are you okay?” he asked, looking her over. There was a worry in his eyes, but nothing like the panic of last month and Hera. Granted, Hera was _Hera_ , but Sabine took it as another sign that their Kanan was making his way back to them.

“No,” she admitted. “I missed a trip wire, Kanan. Me!”

Kanan’s smile lit the space between them, though there was a slightly bitter cast to it. “Maybe all this backup from Phoenix squadron is making you soft.” He gestured to Zeb, who took the other side of the girder and helped him pull it off of her. 

“No Mandalorian should ever get _that_ soft,” she averred, wincing as the pressure came off her calf. Ow, that hurt!

Zeb lifted her to her feet, holding her there carefully. “Can you walk?” he asked gently.

Sabine snorted at him and limped toward the broken wall with his help. Ezra and Hera were silhouetted against the far end of the half-collapsed corridor she’d been blithely dashing down ten minutes ago. “Well, I’m certainly not letting you _carry_ me,” she told him. “My humiliation would be complete.”

She cursed herself for the flippant remark when, twenty feet from daylight, Chopper blasted a warning of _incoming,_ and the ground shook under laser fire.

“We’ve worn out our welcome!” Hera shouted, still unwilling to leave the mouth of the rubble they’d beaten through to get to her.

“GO!” Zeb yelled. He stopped helping Sabine walk and muttered, “Sorry about this,” before swinging her into his arms and sprinting for the _Ghost_. 

Sabine buried her face in his chest in embarrassment. Just _great_.

**********

They left a half dozen angry TIE fighters in their wake, but the _Ghost_ made it out and safely into hyperspace without another mishap. 

Kanan wrapped Sabine’s leg in her cabin, so she could lick her wounds in private. He was more amused by her outrage than frightened by the injury, and he took his own reaction as a good sign. He’d just needed time, he guessed. 

Time heals all wounds, right?

“We’ll send you over to _Home_ so that cute Chandrilan...?” 

“Rill,” Sabine supplied, irritation just heightening her blush. 

“So Rill can heal it properly.”

Sabine growled at him and flopped down, hissing as the movement aggravated her injury.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. 

She was quiet a long moment. “Do you really think that’s true?” 

“What?”

“That we’re getting soft?” she asked, looking up at him. “That being with the fleet is…”

“Making us lose our edge?” 

Did he?

“I think we worked well together,” he offered finally. “I think… I think a lot has happened to make that a lot more difficult than it used to be.”

“Like ‘Commander Syndulla’?” she commented.

The reply threw him. He’d thought she’d bring _him_ up, given that really, his problems had become everyone’s, hadn’t they? But…

“Commander?” he asked. 

Sabine closed her eyes, pain making furrows in the skin around them. “It’s what a lot of the squadron calls her now.” She opened her eyes a slit, as if watching for his reaction. “Figure it’s only a matter of time before they make that official.”

Kanan agreed. He’d been thinking about it for a while. Wondering what she’d do when they offered it to her. He’d even thought about approaching Ahsoka about it, but then she’d hared off to do Senator Organa’s bidding last month and hadn’t been back since.

“We’ll deal with it when it happens,” he told her, because of course, it was going to happen.

“Where you all go, I go,” she reminded him. The painkillers were pulling at her and Kanan gripped her shoulder and rose.

“Still true,” he promised. “Get some rest. We’ll be back to the fleet soon.”

As he closed the door behind him, words from a lifetime ago flitted through his mind: _Always in motion, the future is._

Maybe, Master Yoda, he thought to himself, but sometimes all roads lead to the same place. 

And not always a place you want to be.

*************

tbc...


	7. For it is neither lie nor wish

Ahsoka Tano was tired. Down to the bones tired.

Two months ago, Senator Organa had contacted her about a group that had asked for help training and preparing to resist the Empire on the planet of Thintaara. It wasn’t the first time she’d undertaken such a job, but she supposed she just wasn’t the young liberator she used to be.

But her work was done there, for the moment. She set course for _Phoenix Home_ gladly, knowing she’d have just a few scant hours to sleep before she got there. Knowing she’d need every moment.

She had checked in with Sato once during her time on Thintaara, to be told of the work Hera and her crew continued to do. He wasn’t the person to ask about _how_ Hera and her people were _doing_ , though, and she tasked Sabine with that job.

Kanan still kept to the _Ghost_ whenever possible. And he and Ezra had been busy.

“They train a lot—saved my butt a couple of weeks ago as a result.” Sabine had sighed. “I think he’s doing better, but… This isn’t the place for him.”

Ahsoka had nodded. “Too many memories,” she figured. She knew the feeling.

Sabine did, too. “Yeah.” And then she grinned a little grin. “But he’s got us, so…”

“That can make all the difference in the world,” Ahsoka assured her.

That had been two weeks ago. Ahsoka hoped things had continued to improve.

What Kanan had gone through would have been grueling for a normal human, if the human could even survive as long as he had. But for a Jedi to be subjected to the kind of machinations the Dark Side employed, on top of the physical toll? She would have worried if he hadn’t had problems.

And yet he’d given up nothing. She almost smiled at that. He’d been smart from the beginning. If you know nothing, you can say nothing. No matter how long they terrorize you….

The problem became saying something _after_ his rescue. 

After the full debriefing they’d held when he’d finally emerged from the bacta tank, she’d watched him shudder in his medical bed for long minutes—until Hera had entered the room. And then he’d pulled it all back into himself and tried to be “okay”.

Ahsoka had tried, on numerous occasions, to speak to him about what had happened, but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, talk about it. She could easily accept him not speaking to her about it. Even given their shared experience as Jedi and their acquaintance as children, they weren’t friends. What had happened to him was intimate. Even if she could understand, he had no reason to open up to her.

But he never opened up to anyone. She hadn’t even realized that until she’d watched Hera try to speak to him one day in the command center, only to be quietly, gently rebuffed. If he couldn’t speak to the woman he clearly loved, how could he move beyond this?

She should never have let Bail talk her into convincing Hera to call off the search. They should have gotten him back long before he reached Mustafar. 

“Should’ves only get you so far, Snips,” Anakin had told her once. “You can drown in should’ves.”

She probably could.

Ahsoka had read the report on the raid that had damaged the _Ghost_ and sent Hera to the medical bay. She wondered how Kanan had handled that. Hera was Kanan’s rock—she was what he’d fought so hard to protect. Her and Ezra.

Ezra had been trying to help, Ahsoka knew. She’d spoken to him in those early weeks, when he was clearly afraid of losing his master to an altogether different darkness.

“I just… I can feel it under his—I don’t know, under his _skin_.” He’d shaken his head at his inability to explain it. “When we’re training, he can push it aside—he’s taught me so much since he got back. More than before, in fact—but when he’s just living, it’s always crawling there.”

Ahsoka tried to clear her mind, to rest her body before she reached the fleet.

 _The past is immutable._ _  
_ _The future unknowable._ _  
_ _The now unthinkable._   
Just livable. Just now.

What was ahead of her, she’d find when she got there. And to face it, she needed _rest_.

************

“Ahsoka is on final approach,” Hera announced.

Kanan leaned against the wall of the command center, outside the circle of the leaders of the rebellion. Because he wasn’t one. He wasn’t now and he didn’t want to be in the future. That Hera even made him attend—because as a Jedi they all thought he’d have some insight—got under his skin in the worst way. 

“The rebel cell on Thintaara has been established,” Sato announced. 

_Good for them_.

“There’ll be a need for ongoing support there,” Fundla warned. “The Empire has stripped Thintaara of much of their resources.”

_Like they’re stripping Lothal right now while we stand here discussing._

*************

Ahsoka reached out through the Force as soon as she docked. Ezra stood bright and calm and peaceful in her mind. In the _Ghost_. And Kanan...

Gone was the crushing fear she’d felt under every movement of Kanan’s soul since Mustafar. It should have consoled her—would have, but for the emotions that had taken its place.

Kanan was angry. Bitter. Her steps sped up as she approached the war room, feeling him there, growing more and more irritated. Yet muted. He was shielding himself. She wondered if Ezra could feel it. But surely not. He’d been at peace, after all. 

She was ten feet from the door to the control room when that door swished open and Kanan, anger written in the overly relaxed movement of his body, stepped out. 

“If you want Jedi on your team, I’d better train one, hadn’t I?” The words were flip and irreverent. Not the Kanan she knew at all.

The door snapped closed, but not before Ahsoka got a glimpse of the shocked look on Sato’s face and the angry glare on Hera’s. 

Kanan slammed into her before he saw her, intensifying the wrongness of the feelings boiling off of him.

“Ahsoka!” he exclaimed. The wall between him and the rest of the world thickened as she watched. “Sorry. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

“I see that,” she said gently. “Can we talk?”

“Don’t you have some big meeting to get to?” he asked, the bitterness he shielded oozing out another way. “Or was that the one I just left?”

She smiled as disarmingly as possible. “It was,” she acknowledged. “But they can wait.”

Kanan headed for the _Ghost_ , trying as hard as he could not to project his anger. His disgust. What were they doing _here_ anyway?

Ezra met them at the airlock with a near panic in his eyes, and Kanan sighed. He needed more shield training than Ezra did!

“Ahsoka, hi,” Ezra greeted her in a small voice. He looked Kanan up and down. “Is there something wrong?”

Ahsoka smiled. “No,” she lied. “Kanan and I needed a private place to talk.” She emphasized private in a way that actually meant something to Ezra, clearly. 

“Gotcha.” And with a very concerned look at Kanan... he left. The whole ship. 

The conscription of his apprentice was unsettling to an already unsettled mind, and Kanan could do nothing but follow Ahsoka to his own quarters and close the door behind them.

“How have you been, Kanan?” she asked, in a way that brooked no argument. 

Fine, she wanted to know his problem, he’d tell her.

“The Empire has started drilling into the sacred mounds on Lothal, looking for more ore to fuel the factories,” he grated. “The locals fought back and were imprisoned for their trouble.” He started pacing, unable to keep still now he’d gotten started. “They’ll end up working those same mines, you know?” He stopped dead and pointed toward the control room on the adjoining ship. “They’re in there discussing how we can build up _more_ rebel bands and we’re just letting the people we inspired in the first place rot!”

“Lothal is firmly under Imperial control now,” Ahsoka started.

“Because _we let them take it!_ ” Kanan growled. “Ezra told the people to rise up and they did and they had _no one_ to back them.” His next words flew out without his permission. “I almost died to get that message out and—”

His hands were shaking. He was staring at them and they were shaking.

“I cannot fight another war that doesn’t help.” 

His words hung in the air between them.

“You won’t die for another army that won’t protect you.” 

Kanan glared at her for a fraction of a second before he saw that she understood exactly what he meant. 

“I was there, Kanan,” she whispered. “I wasn’t a Jedi, but Order 66 didn’t care. I fled the same as you. Survived the same as you.”

“So how can you believe that this is going to do any good?” he asked finally. “Depa was right—Jedi can’t be the army. It isn’t what the Force was meant to be used for.”

“The Force should be used to encourage the Light, Kanan. An army or a band of villagers, it doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me,” he stated coldly. And it did. He wouldn’t fight for a general or a senator or anyone he couldn’t trust not to turn on him.

“Have you asked Hera to leave?”

Kanan laughed at that. “This is where Hera belongs, Ahsoka,” he said, feeling the truth of it in his bones. “She was, probably literally, born to be a leader in this army.”

“But you can’t follow her? Here, I mean?”

“It’s not her I don’t trust.”

“Then you must ask yourself whether leaving is what’s best for all of you.”

Kanan just stared at her.

“A good friend of mine once said that if he couldn’t trust his superiors, he couldn’t trust himself.” She smiled a sad smile. “He made the choice to leave. I hope he’s alive today because of it.”

 _Did_ he trust himself?

“I don’t know,” he answered what had gone unvoiced.

“You are stronger than you think, Kanan,” she said quietly. She’d said it before. “You were stronger than you thought when you questioned everything around you at the temple.”

 _“Always with you, there are questions,”_ Yoda said in his mind.

“And with you few answers,” Kanan said aloud, looking away.

“The answers must come from you,” Ahsoka told him. She walked to the door, opening it and standing there for a moment. “What has happened, has happened.”

Kanan finished the traditional meditation as she left. “Learn from what has passed, but let it not forbid a future.”

Forget the future. **Now** , in the _present_ , people were dying. On Lothal, on Thintaara…. People were dying.

Could he really turn his back on that? 

***************

tbc....


	8. But of its own path born

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes place on the way to the operation at the beginning of "The Siege of Lothal."

“All right, then,” Kanan announced, loose and sarcastic. “Let’s get this supply trip on the road.”

Hera gritted her teeth and detached from _Home_. “This supply trip” was a complicated dance including a convoy carrying shield generators that the Alliance desperately needed. They’d be going in with _Phoenix Home_ acting as both decoy and security pass. It was big and dangerous and nothing to be flippant about.

But flippant seemed to be all Kanan could work up to these days.

Having him around the last week or two was like having the old Kanan back. Not the old Kanan who could always be trusted to watch her back and do what was right, but the really old Kanan who she’d wanted to smack more times than she could count.

As they entered hyperspace, she turned her chair to look at her crew. Her family. Her slightly broken, clearly devoted, very taxing family.

“We have three hours,” she said, wishing she could _sleep_ those three hours. “This is more than just a smash and grab,” she warned. “We’ll need to make sure we protect _Phoenix Home_ and get what we need.”

“We’ve always done okay before,” Kanan said blithely, standing up and heading for the common area. “I’m sure, with all that _backup_ , that we’ll do just fine.”

Ezra sent Hera an apologetic look as he stood, but she smiled her absolution. It wasn’t his fault his master was acting like a child.

Hera turned back around and stared out at the blur of hyperspace. It took a minute for her to realize Sabine had stayed behind.

“Kanan’s being an ass,” Sabine said quietly.

“I’m not sure what’s gotten into him,” Hera agreed. “But as long as he helps us get this job done, I can ignore him until I get a chance to give him a talking to.”

Sabine was silent for a long stretch. “You didn’t use to have to,” she commented finally.

Hera turned her chair around and faced the younger woman. And Sabine was a woman now, more and more. She sat there serious and worried and not at all sure of herself, and it just added a little more fuel to Hera’s fire. 

Kanan had been through what no one else could fathom. He’d come out the other side. _This_ , this juvenile mindset, this backslide into that man who ignored what he was, what he could and _should_ do? This had nothing to do with Mustafar. 

“Have you talked to him?” Sabine asked. 

“We’ve all tried talking to him, Sabine—”

“About you staying with the fleet,” Sabine cut in. 

Hera stared at her silently. 

“Because I know that’s what you want to do.”

 _What_ I _want to do._ “Don’t you want that, too?”

Sabine cocked her head. “I really don’t know, Hera,” she replied, the words chilling Hera despite the heat of the ship around her. “I mean, I know we’re doing good here, but…” She shook her head. “We did a lot of good on Lothal, too.”

Hera nodded. “We did. But there’s no place for us there now.”

“Are you sure?” Sabine wanted to know. “Things are getting worse there. Maybe we could help.”

“Sabine, we’re part of an Alliance now,” Hera tried to explain. “That means we can’t make decisions just for ourselves.” Sabine nodded reluctantly, and Hera continued. “By helping the greater rebellion, we’re helping Lothal. And Krownest. And Ryloth.”

Sabine nodded again and stood. “I hope you’re right.”

Hera watched her leave and the door swish closed. 

“I hope I’m right, too.”

**********

Ezra sighed as he entered the galley. Zeb was there and Ezra nearly walked back out. He didn’t want to talk to anyone right now.

“Hera’s gonna smack him soon,” Zeb commented, putting together some plate of food Ezra couldn’t quickly identify. The sight of it turned his stomach for some reason, so he pulled out Hera’s Ryl tea instead.

“If she doesn’t, I might,” he replied.

Ever since Ahsoka came back—since the day when she’d said those words that meant she needed to talk to Kanan about something no one else could know, about something he couldn’t say to anyone but her—Kanan had been difficult. In a totally different way than he’d ever been difficult before. 

Training had become fractious again, with Kanan losing his temper over things he didn’t need to lose his temper over, details he didn’t used to worry about. And he was downright rude to Hera sometimes. Not the way he was the very rare times the two of them were fighting, but just… like he didn’t respect her anymore. 

It was hard being around to watch, but they didn’t really have any choice, did they?

Zeb wolfed down the food—whatever it had been—quickly and stood up. “Well, whatever burr’s in his butt, he’d best get rid of it soon.”

Ezra stared at the water he’d set to boiling and took down two mugs, nodding to his friend as the Lasat walked out.

Yeah. He hadn’t felt unsure in his family in a long time, even with all they’d been through with the Inquisitor and the torture and the aftermath, but Hera shouldn’t have to put up with this. And he didn’t know how long it would be until she just refused to do so.

He filled both mugs and let the tea steep and just stared into space. He didn’t want to reach out with the Force and feel the crew. He’d taken to doing it more and more once he got the hang of it, and then less and less once he found it meant encountering the wall from Kanan that fairly oozed bitterness. Kanan was clearly trying to shield Ezra from the feeling, but he wasn’t succeeding.

Jedi weren’t supposed to feel negative emotions like that, right? That was what he’d thought until he’d said it to Ahsoka.

“Kanan isn’t your typical Jedi,” she’d said with a gentle smile. “I guess I’m not sure there is such a thing as a typical Jedi anymore. When there’s no one to teach the old ways—”

“Kanan’s teaching me the old ways,” he’d argued. “Well, sort of.”

Ahsoka’s smile turned impish grin. “I think ‘sort of’ is what we’re left with.” Her grin faded. “There are no masters to lead the Jedi now,” she pointed out. “And the reason they’re gone has tainted those who were not done learning.”

“Kanan’s not tainted.” Something about the word both scared and angered him. 

“Maybe ‘colored’ is a better word,” she corrected herself. “Even a Jedi raised in the temple isn’t immune from the emotions our species are all born with. It takes years _and training_ to find a way past the negative, to find a path where bitterness and anger are unnecessary.” She sighed, clearly remembering something or someone. “Even Master Jedi succumb to it from time to time.” She looked at him candidly. “It doesn’t make him less Jedi, Ezra. Only more human.”

_A human jerk right now,_ he thought to himself. He held one cup in each hand and headed for the cockpit.

If one human male wasn’t going to keep Hera company like he usually did on the way to an operation, the other one was going to have to.

Until Kanan came to his senses.

**********

the end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes. That's really where I'll end it. Sorry. We'll pick up on how things go in the next movement.


End file.
